LISSOME LOLITAS OR TEENAGE TRASH

I was gawking at the gold records draped on the Brother Studio walls, imagining Brian waddling out at 4 a.m. armed with Lysol and a washrag, rubbing the fingerprint smears on "All Summer Long" ("Out damned spot," he grumbles bitterly, "What, will these hands never be clean? Here's the smell of surf still!") when Kim Fowley suddenly loomed into view to make introductions.

"Didn't I meet you during my male

They're puckish and cute today; will they be hustling hash art the strip _ tomorrow? Do you care?

prostitute days?" he deadpans, shaking hands with a grip like a dead trout. Loomed is the word, fans. Why Mel Brooks never cast Kim as Young Frankenstein is beyond me—L.A.'s famed entrepreneur is a dead ringer, built like.the Seattle Space Needle gone amok; long and lanky, ribs poking through his wrinkled Automatic Man t-shirt like gothic struts.

"I've got monoglucotenditis—well, something like that," he confides immediately, "so I have to eat seven meals a day or I become increasingly violent. . ." His jack-o-lantern visage could sink a thousand ships. His more prominent features include hollow cheeks, radium eyes and a waxy, yellow build-up complexion.

Apparently the veteran studio hound is due to eat soon, 'cause Kim's in the process^ of bawling out his most notorious proteges, the Runaways, about a song he's written for their forthcoming opus, appropriately titled Queens of Noise. Cherie Currie (the blonde lead singer with the big dachshund eyes) and Joan Jett, the band'sanswer to Keith Richard (tawdry dyedblack locks and a well-worn bottle of Jim Beam) are doing most of the cat fighting.

Young Mr. F's creations are holding down their end famously. Kim careens on the defensive, beating a hasty retreat from the dimly-lit lounge to the safety of his castle-like control booth. More hysteria prevails therein.

You'll excuse me for not reporting all the sordid details of their high-decibel exchange ("I ain't playing guitar on that crummy song!" was the gist of Joan's argument) but there was a far more titillating brawl in progress—on the TV screen dominating the far end of the room. It sounded familiar.

"AAWWWWWHH Ricky!" pouted Lucy, hair pushed back behind her ears, "I can learn to play the saxophone. Or couldn't we just dance together? Ethel and I've been watching Arthur Murray every—" Rock Hudson is doing a guest-spot on Ricky's rhumba lounge act. Lucy, in turn, has concocted a predictable hustle—will she really squeeze into that tuba case?—to share the stage with The Rock.

Ricky looses a burst of staccato Latin obscenities, Lucy exits in tears, and I figure before the half hour's out, she'll have bounded back on stage, costumed as a banana, knocking over music stands and palm shrubs while Ricky and The Rock smile paternally at the mayhem. . . . Both fights could've gone on all night—in fact there seems to be some weird sonic relationship between Fowley's embattled sponsorship of his teen-age rock rat pack and Desi's slapstick skirmishes with the mad redhead—but Lita Ford, the eldest (pushing 18) and most affectionate Runaway (lots of hugs for her aging reportorial chum) interrupted the reverie.

"What AM radio wants Is garbage. And the Runaways are gonna give 'em garbage. Kim Fowley"

"How's Chicago?" she queried after a brief clinch, remembering the night your correspondent escorted his young tenderhooks across the city's sordid Rush Street disco circuit. (Ms. Jett, after a liberal sampling of margeuritas declared the town's most glamorous watering hole "icky." "This isn't like the Sugar Shack at all," she sniffed, with characteristic hauteur. "I feel like I'm in an old age home.")

Chicago? Terrible, I mutter. How's the record going? Terrible, she mutters. Apparently the Runaways' marriage with Fowley has followed the contours of the archetypal Liz and Dick affair. Young Mr. F may have discovered the girls (in a Denny's parking lot or at Rodney Bingenheimer's or a Ronald Reagan fundraiser—I hear a different tale every time I ask, so I don't vouch | for their veracity) but their fondness for ^ the mad studio scientist varies at every " mood.

Cherie is the best barometer. In the studio, with Kim at the helm, she's pert and cooperative, acting as denmother to dissidents like Ms. Jett. On their recent visit to Chi-town however, her claws were bared.

"I don't like the album at all," she confessed, referring to the group's first release. "It's got too many songs we didn't like—at least, not the way the tracks were released. It doesn't have enough crunch.

"Kim worked too hard," she continued, stealing a glance at Joan, who nodded in support. "He put in piano parts on songs like 'American Nights' that we didn't want. It was like done behind our backs."

In L.A., Fowley had his say. "What AM radio wants is garbage," he growls, rewriting lyrics for a new tune at a break-neck pace, "and the Runaways are gonna give 'em garbage. They heard the applause and got the encores and thought they didn't need me anymore. Now that it's time for a make or break record, they're back in my arms again.

"The girls know what's good for them," he continued, scowling in Cherie's direction. "They sold 70,000 records this time around. If Queens of Noise doesn't double that figure, Mercury will drop 'em like that!" He gleams demonically. "I wonder how they'll like working as waitresses on The Strip.

"I remember their first gigs," he

smiled, gunning the monologue into third gear. "They played on top of some garage with 14 squad cars jammed into the driveway. Now that they're big stars, of course, they think they can get by without Big Daddy. Well, we'll see.

"I've got other big acts. The Quick, Venus and The Razor Blades—now there's a band," he says, pointing to "Venus," a Huck Finnish blonde who's real name is Steve. "We're gonna have a whole new punk-rock scene in L.A. I'm running the new Whiskey joint, which should be a veritable haven for our community's younger set."

Fowley is no stiff. As soon as the legendary L.A. raconteur (whose musical career dates back to the days of the Hollywood Argyles) set eyes on Joan Jett, outfitted in black-widow Suzi Quatro leather, he knew he'd stumbled onto a hot item.

All Young Mr F had to do was survey Rodney's clientele. Loads of lushettes, caressing the lounge with their feline eyes; pouting, baring their teeth, sneering, stroking their hips with halfchewed straws (a favorite nymphet strategem). Why should all this fresh flesh go to waste?

They'd have to wait years to break into Hollywood's B-picture scene (although Joan shoil'ld try the AIP back-lot; after those Ronnie Howard box-office bombs, they're probably dying for a temptress type); but rock 'n' roll offers a hallowed tradition of cradle-robbing. Indeed, nymphet worship runs through the veins of American pop culture with the consistency of Texas crude.

"I don't like the first album at all. It doesn*t have enough crunch. Joan Jett"

I could take you back all the way to Hester Prynne, but Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night targets the modern archetype: breathless, lissome Rosemary, the dewy little silent screen starlet whose "feverish bloom" made a shambles of Dick Diver's shaky, alcoholdrenched European retreat.

"He was chilled by the innocence of her kiss," F. Scott agonizes, as if hearing the Ronettes for the first time. "She was a white carnation left after a dance."

Does this sound like our girls? No, far too elegant—too much tenderness and not enough tease. Let's journey ahead to that masterwork of lust and angst, the Sunset Strip billboard of comic pathos, Lolita, a throbbing little novel penned by Russian emigre Vladimir Nabokov only a few short years after his hideously abrupt exposure to American teen mores (a

professorship at Cornell).

Ah, now the terrain looks familiar. Particularly Kubrick's diabolically funny movie version, chockful of James Mason's misanthropic gag-lines and Sue Lyon's punk cuntessa performance.

Lolita pollenated the wet-dream, teen-queen mold; her mouthful of bubble-gum, eyes glued to comic books, lots of hot baths and TV snacks. . . Doesn't this ring a bell? Chuck Berry perhaps. No sooner had Lolita been published than this slickeddown St. Louis guitar strangler surfaced with his lurid catalogue of jail-bait Delilahs: Carol, Nadine, Sweet Little

Sixteen, Bobby Soxer and Little Marie... And how about a Little Queenie, huh? "Standing over by the record machine," Chuck leers, "She's too cute to be a minute over 17. . ." Listen to "Memphis" again—how old do ya think Marie was? Try six.

Berry wasn't the only luminary to flirt with 10 to life for running an underage railroad from New Orleans to Chicago.

"This Isn't a tits-and-ass show. Cherie Currie"

TURN TO PAGE 67.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31.

RUNAWAYS

Jerry Lee Lewis threw his rock 'n' roll shoes away for his 13-year-old cousin—earning him a prominent niche on the great American AM blacklist—lushettes were a pardonable sin but crossing the threshold with your pre-teen first cousin was sacrilege.

The Runaways exploit this nympho-

philia to the hilt. Read their lyrics and weep. No one would accuse them of being weaned on Nancy Drew. Both the emotion and the execution are abysmal ("I wanna kiss, wet and real, make me scream, what's your name") but don't let the cliches fool you. What they lack in subtlety ("Hey street boy, I'll give you something to live for," coos Cherie in "Cherry Bomb", "Have ya, grab ya, till you're sore") they make up for in continuity.

Every number offers us lascivious old trolls a distinct pleasure-pit fantasy, a warm casserole of freedom and repression. At Brother Studio j Fowley spent most of the evening rewriting a ditty entitled "Heavy Metal Music" since it failed to cohere with this sub-erotic vision.

Fowley knew what he was looking for. After the usual flurry of arguments subsided, he rechristened the tune "Midnight Music," quipping rtsounds more alluring huh?" (In all fairness, it must be noted that your correspondent drunkenly suggested some lyrics of his own, most of which were unceremoniously rejected. "No, you don't get any songwriting credit," Fowley snapped. "Consider it an honor just to be in the same room with LA's reigning 38-year-old sex symbol ")

Of course the girls feel a wee bit uncomfortable typecast in this volup-

tuous posture. Even their highly derivative stage show (lotsa Bowie, the Coop and Iggy impressions) refrains from overt cotton-candy posing. Let it suffice to say that the live set's choreography features an abundance of mannequin-like expressions, microphone antics and sisterhood solidarity-type hugs (Yuunch—where is Gower Champion now that we really need him?)

"This isn't a tits-and-ass show," Cherie demurs before the onset of our Chi-town promenade. "Most girl bands spend too much time competing with guys. We use our femininity in the act but we don't try to have more balls than men—just feminine balls.

"When you're 16, you can't stand up there and be a sex object," she complains, "It's just not part of being 16. I'm not old enough to play Brigitte Bardot or Raquel Welch. Hell, I'm 16."

Ms. Jett took up the gauntlet. "Shit, I don't even have any tits or ass," she brags, slipping off the couch to model her modest derriere. "Well, what about that?"

I make mental notes that I must learn how to blush. "Well, you're not exactly Patti Smith," I sputter, fumbling for a new line of interrogation.

That jibe struck a raw nerve. "EEUUWH" groans Cherie who apparently has already alienated several Patti boosters with her lack of affectioh for the performer's oeuvre. (CREEM'sown Lisa Robinson, for example, was "none loo amused" by certain "unlady-like" Rurtaway remarks... perhaps she's been reading too much Edith Wharton lately.)

"People are always taking pot-shots at us," Cherie complained, "Calling us dykes, but Patti thinks she's a poet— well she's a slobby one—that druddy leather jacket, tits down to her knees and spitting on the floor. Yuuch, She's such a snob."

"I was wearing a leather jacket," Joan pipes in, "and she still didn't talk to me." Maybe if Patti had known how these aspiring young literary critics have suffered, she would've been more sympathetic. Really kids, they've had it tough.

"We haven't been in jail," says Joan, "but if we weren't in this business, we would be." Cherie shakes her head furiously. "Me too. I was always being Suspended from school—for cutting classes, srfioking in the halls. I hated school. The kids would throw rocks at me 'cause I'd always wear glitter to class. Shit, I'd beat 'em up right back."

"I fought too,''adds Ms. Jett, crushing a cigarette *butt, "cause they'd throw rocks at me. I'd grab some seltzer bottles and throw 'em right back. Shit, I set off smoke-bombs in the school bus."

"That's right," adds Cherie, "they used to call me and my sister Double Trouble—we were Bad. I'd never go back to school. When I left there, everybody hated me—I mean hated me —and I hated them too."

After that sort of ruptured adolescence, the Runaways find touring an entirely pleasurable occupation. "I'd never been out of LA before," Cherie admits, "except to the beach."

Their favorite pastime? Redecorating their hotel rooms. "You should see our suite," Cherie says proudly," "We bring nails along. Big ones, to hammer our favorite album covers on the wall. Lotsa Bowie and Aerosmith."

"And we lug our stereo and speakers around everywhere," adds Joan, "Turn 'em up all the way. No one else will room with us anymore. They're always complaining it's too loud."

Later that evening, in the squalid depths of another Chi-town disco, the lushettes got a chance to offer more of their astute musical judgement. After a couple of drinks, they grew bored watching the local garage outfit crank out retread versions of Kiss and Aerosmith standards. So the girls shouted requests of their own.

Joan and I wander off the dance floor, ears ringing. We play pong. I lose. We play War-Game. I lose. We play Le Mans. I lose. We wander back to the dance floor.

"Cherry Borrib!" Sandy West, the Runaways' drummer screams over the din. "American Nights," yells Lita. What's this—requesting their own tunes? This is unheard of. The garage band's lead singer is baffled. Who are these twisted little cranks? Finally, between songs, he speaks up.

"What's your shirt say, honey?" he asks Lita, who's been checking out the guitarist's melange of amps and footpedals. She pulls her jacket apart to reveal the glitter-stenciled lettering: The Runaways. The girls all smile. Surely he'll recognize us now—you know who we are, what kind of select audience you're dealing with. ,

"Oh, great," he pouts,' displaying typically bar-band surly charm. "Does that mean you're gonna leave us! Like maybe now?" The band members onstage, regaining solidarity, grin wick-, edly. They break into "Train Keep A Rollin'."

Joan and Lita quietly finish their drinks. No more requestsforthat group. Not from the Runaways.